Former pilot and 9/11 conspiracy theorist shoots and kills 2 teen children, then himself

Phillip (alternately, "Philip") Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA during the Iran-Contra affair, shot and killed his two teenage children, and the family dog, then killed himself.

Philip Marshall, a veteran airline captain and former government "special activities" contract pilot, has authored three books on Top Secret America, a group presently conducting business as the United States Intelligence Community.

Beginning with his role in the 1980s as a Learjet captain first as part of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting on Pablo Escobar, and later in the covert arming of the Nicaraguan Contras, Marshall has studied and written 30-years worth of covert government special activities and the revolving door of Wall Street tricksters, media moguls, and their well funded politicians.

I am unable to confirm the veracity of the claims in his self-authored bio at this time.

A Facebook page for "The Big Bamboozle" showed posts as recent as January 31 with titles like, "WHAT IS THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY HIDING?," "THE ARAB WORLD KNOWS THE RAID WAS A HOAX," and posts about the Bin Laden assassination having been faked.

"PICTURES PAINT A THOUSAND WORDS," read one such Facebook post from Marshall about photographs of the assassinated Al Qaeda leader. "Since bin Laden died in 2001, these would be "alleged" photos of bin Laden. Give us a break."

He once also pitched those theories to a television news journalist with whom this blogger is acquainted.

A young friend of the two slain teens with whom this blogger is personally acquainted described them as "sweet, funny, lively, good kids."

A tweet from Macaila on January 25:

Would it be wrong if I threw my cat with his claws retracted at my dads face right now?... #pissoff

Photos from the siblings' Instagram feeds suggest that they were outgoing, well-liked by friends, and loved one another very much. In one, Macaila is in the hospital after a "golf cart accident," with her father sitting in the background.

In the last self-portrait she posted on January 28, her brother blows a hair dryer at her while she goofs in the mirror.

"I pretty much just wanted to say how great of a big brother you are," Macaila writes to her brother in another Instagram caption, "I love you so much!"

I’m totally with you. Mental health is inextricable from health in general and should be treated seriously, and available to everyone.

But… how do you help someone who doesn’t want to be helped? Seems that the deeply paranoid would never choose to seek mental care. I mean hell, they literally give people drugs to control their brain chemistry. If you’re afraid of the government/corporations/whoever controlling people already, you’d run a hundred miles the other direction. It’s just not that simple…

Man oh man, Down the rabbit hole of the conspiracy world we go- and of course…. this will be listed as a conspiracy as well, that was meant to shut him up and discredit him at the same time. Those poor kids.

There are so many more people like this guy. How do we tell the difference between someone who holds crazy beliefs as an entertaining diversion, and someone who is grappling with dangerous mental illness? They use the same jargon and display the same chest-thumping bravado, yet one functions benignly in society while the other goes on a kill-crazy rampage.

How about a “The world has to know” type of murder suicide. It’s not unheard of. But it’s stupid to speculate at this early hour. And really, I’d rather just not think about this tradgedy. Call me selfish, that’s what it is I guess.

You know, after Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, so many others, and now this, I keep thinking how incredibly stupid you have to be to move to a white-flight exurb to keep your family safe, given that nearly all of our mass shootings and so many of our murder/suicides are in exactly those white-flight exurbs.

Yeah – but lets compare it to say Chicago. I’d rather live in the exurbs rather than the inner city where there are 10 murders a day some times vs one crazy mass shooting that happens once every 50 years. Bad stuff can happen anywhere. Where there are poor people and drugs you will find the most violence.

Those crimes make the news because they are so unusual, and because they impact areas where wealthy white folks live. Statistically, urban areas tend to have more violent crime, but it doesn’t make the news as much, and is rarely sensationalized like this.

Hmm. Anybody have any theories as to why none of the well-known internet news sites have picked up this story? Nowhere to be found on Yahoo News, Google News, Reuters News, or CNN. Especially with all the sabre rattling over gun issues these days, you’d think that an atrocity like this would be on the front page on at least one of those sources, but I couldn’t find any mention of it anywhere on any of them, not even in the fine print on page 2 and 3 and so on. Just struck me as odd.

Yeah – when people kill their family or loved ones as well as themselves it fills me with a special sort of horror that no other crime manages. What are they doing? “Tidying up”? Making sure their loved ones don’t have to endure the horrible world that the killer can no longer stand? my mind flinches away from it.

Read Eric Hoffer, /The True Believer./ tl;dr version: Nobody is more susceptible to calls to violence than someone who was born in a position of privilege, who had (in their opinion) every reasonable expectation that as long as they did what they were told they would receive every reward, who ends up with less reward than they felt confident they were going to get. All it takes is one charismatic spokesman telling them that they did earn that reward, that somebody lesser cheated them out of it, and the violence comes right out.

In my opinion, that’s why the ex-boyfriend or ex-husband murder-suicide is the signature crime of the Great Recession: statistically speaking, a guy who loses his livelihood has about six months before his wife or girlfriend leaves him for a more successful guy. He feels that he was promised “for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer” and, as a man, he feels like he’s someone who’s entitled to get what he was promised whether or not anybody else does. So when he feels he has no choice left but suicide, he’s also got enough anger to take it out on at least one of the people who betrayed him. Relative privilege is the reason we don’t see nearly as many reversed-gender murder-suicides over the fact that men are statistically likely to leave their wives after a cancer scare; as a person of lower privilege, she isn’t conditioned to get quite that surprised, to feel quite so righteously angry, when she gets betrayed.

People are crying mental illness on this one, but if that’s true then there are an awful lot of mentally ill men in this country. Killing your children or your wife, beating them, threatening them if they want to leave, sexually assaulting women or children . . .these are all symptoms of the same problem. We look at the symptoms, especially when they are this extreme, but we keep avoiding having to look at the disease that causes the symptoms.

I’m not saying I know what the disease is. I wish I did. I know it has something to do with a feeling of entitlement a lot of men seem to have. And rage. Lots of rage. But I don’t pretend to know what exactly goes on in the minds of so many men to get them to the point of thinking it is okay to hurt their “loved” ones or anyone, for that matter.

I know some of you will read this and decide I am a man-hater. That I think all men are vicious beasts. I don’t know what I could say that would change your mind on that. I guess that’s the easy way to not ask some hard questions . . .anyone who takes note of how often men do awful things must hate men. But I don’t. If I did, I don’t think I’d bother puzzling over this stuff.

And some of you will say “Women do bad things, too” as if that somehow negates the validity of asking why men so often arrive at a place in their minds where it is okay for them to do these awful things. Yes, women DO indeed do bad things. And we could discuss that, too. But it’s funny how so many guys jump to that defensive position . . .a weak one by even a casual perusal of crime statistics . . .rather than taking a hard look at their own gender’s behavior.

Mental illness? It might be fair to say that anyone who commits murder is mentally ill. But underneath that is something else, something that is far more common. Something that nobody wants to look at. I can’t help but wonder why that is.

Hmmm… I feel what you are saying on one level. But I disagree. Beating your wife, killing your kids. These *are* signs of mental illness. What you seem to think is that those talking about mental illness mean it as a sort of excuse.

Knowing my own problems, and knowing what life with the mentally ill can be like, I’d say it’s no excuse. Rather, a sort of explanation that requires context to understand in the way it manifests.

What you’re looking for is the intersection of power, privilege, narcissistic rage, mental illness, and the American family. And folks, it isn’t pretty.

You’re making some serious claims without any evidence I can see. Don’t think I’m defending [insert group], I’m just wondering what evidence you have, or even what specifically you’re trying to get at.

I’d say it’s a social problem. Men are promised a lot of unrealistic things by American society, media and culture. Things like: you’ll have a hot wife, you’ll get a job doing what you love, if you work hard enough you’ll be successful, in America you can be whoever you want to be, the “nice guys never get the girl” bullshit excuse, and the “assholes are what women really want” phenomenon.

Men might feel entitled, but it’s not necessarily their own doing. And while we men absolutely don’t have a right to any of these things, you can at least know there is a reason for such feelings, as wrong as it is.

It only took a few comments before a man came in to blame his wife (who wasn’t even there!) for this man murdering his children because “maybe she cheated on him” and “didn’t live up to his expectations”. Even when clicking on a simple link brings to light that he beat his wife. Still, though — someone had to immediately assume that she was a lying whore (all because she no longer lived with him), with the unsaid statement that it was her fault he went nuts and killed their children.

Do you have a citation for that? Interesting that you accused Karen of making claims, when she was clearly just thinking and asking questions, and yet your claim is pretty empty, with no proof. (And is this even something you can necessarily prove? Can you really fully separate mental illness from culture and society?)

And when you say something like “men might feel entitled” it makes it pretty clear that you find that point pretty inconsequential, while I think it’s very important.

I’d say it’s a pretty complicated subject, and you’re both right, or at least not wrong, but your total dismissal of Karen’s questions and thoughts is interesting but not surprising.

And:

Men are promised a lot of unrealistic things by American society,

And do you agree that society, including American society, is patriarchal?

Sure, of course society puts a lot of pressure on men — but why do you suppose that is?

I’m bogging the conversation down with semantics, so I should probably not have used the word often.

I agree American society is quite patriarchal. And I’d say the reason for that has to do with America’s roots in religious conservatism. People are naturally afraid of deviation from the status quo, or at least entrenched incumbencies are. And America’s status quo started out with patriarchal values. But I’m rambling now, and obviously have gotten way out of my depth. That was quick.

Anyway, I probably would have been better off not posting anything in the first place.

I’m not thinking very well on this, and I don’t have research available at the moment to cite my own claims, which I know already makes me a hypocrite.

I didn’t even notice that might when I wrote it. Were it not pointed out in this kind of emotionally charged thread, I probably would have chalked it up to just being my style of prose. But I definitely can see that it’s more likely to be evidence of my internal biases.

That said, your claims are really just … musings and considerations, which isn’t a bad thing, but don’t treat them as claims, and then it won’t be as easy to call you a hypocrite. :D And not every musing is a claim, or needs to be. I don’t think Karen was trying to *claim* anything, at least not specifically.

I think religion has some to do with it, but not all — religion is everywhere, and in every society, so is it the cause, or just another symptom, or both?

Mainstream religion is just conservative politics in another guise, whatever the society. It lags behind the mainstream centre. People hide behind it to disguise their ugly views. Maybe some are swayed one way or another but probably not. That the predominant American flavor of Christianity appears particularly homophobic and misogynistic probably reflects more on American society & politics than on anything else.

That said, I think people ought to demand more of their religious leaders to spread more love and acceptance. And everyone should demand more of our politicians, our media, our educational institutions, to spread more understanding and drive out the ignorance that leads people to hide behind religion.

If everyone could be a little less hateful and ignorant it would be easier to spot the people who really are dangerous.

@boingboing-0a69e2db28ae2f16a203997c548b79be:disqus Mainstream religion … what are you comparing mainstream religion to? And what do you define mainstream religion as, anyway? The Catholic faith is quite old and has NEVER been known for being super accepting, and wouldn’t you call that mainstream?

And is the rest of the religious world any less homophobic and misogynistic than we are? I don’t really think so.

As a man (it’s even in my name up there), I see this all the time with other men- people who aren’t murderers (at least, I hope not) but who have that entitlement and think violence is okay in hypothetical circumstances- if their girlfriend leaves them, if their wife cheats on them. They ARE vicious beasts, and their behavior is as alien and incomprehensible to me, a man, as it is to you. Being of the same gender as them doesn’t give me any power to influence their behavior- I’m not friends with these people. I avoid them, quite deliberately. They don’t care what I think, and would just as soon inflict violence upon me for having a different mindset. I can’t even call the police on them, because they haven’t DONE anything- yet. I agree that men are definitely more dangerous as a whole when it comes to situations like this, but I’m at a loss for what can be done, other than refusing to be one of “those” men.

Well there are multiple things at play here. I’m not sure that men are generally more dangerous by nature, but I think we as a society view men murdering women and children with a sort of naturalistic fallacy.

Well … you don’t THINK you’re friends with them, anyway. Abusers aren’t always obvious, particularly to someone who doesn’t know what it’s like to be abused, and who likely isn’t really at risk of being abused (especially by their partner). And abuse isn’t a always blatantly physical, either.

This is what we call privilege. As someone who was in an abusive relationship for 2 years with someone no one (and I mean no one) believed could be so awful to another human being he claimed to love, it must be nice.

Except that in my experience the monsters ARE usually in plain sight, except that they don’t show their monsterness except to the person they are abusing. The biggest monsters look and act like “normal people” or “nice guys”- they are friendly to the neighbours, helpful to their co-workers, charming and likeable to the victim’s friends and family. This is a form of manipulation, and helps to isolate the victim, particularly when the abuse is non-physical. It is harder to get people to understand that “great guy” is ruthless and cruel in private, for trivial, arbitrary reasons, on purpose. It is also a very destructive mind-fuck to the victim, who endlessly soul searches WHY this person is so nice to everyone else, and nice to her… sometimes… but then HURTS them deliberately other times while blaming them for why they are being hurt.

Much of the focus on perpetrators has focussed on the abuser’s emotions, like the abusive behaviour is a deep rooted problem with their self esteem. The real truth is that the abuser has a problem with their THINKING and a profound sense of entitlement, with a bottomless well of justifications for WHY they abuse, as in “the victim made me do it because (insert made up reason here)”.

From a social perspective, abusers also tend to seek out friends/peers who support and justify their abuse, because they are also of a similar mindset (like racists or homophobes or MRA’s who really relish the power over trip.

Except that in my experience the monsters ARE usually in plain sight, except that they don’t show their monsterness except to the person they are abusing.

This is actually far closer to what I was trying to say, so thank you.

From a social perspective, abusers also tend to seek out friends/peers who support and justify their abuse, because they are also of a similar mindset (like racists or homophobes or MRA’s who really relish the power over trip.

This isn’t my experience at all, and I think this assumption could be dangerous. My abusive ex was a pretty normal guy in all respects, and his friends were all pretty normal. He didn’t smack me around. He was manipulative and controlling, but even I didn’t notice until nearly 2 years into the relationship. Most of his abuse was sexual, if it matters.

His (OUR) friends really had no idea. He was really quite good at hiding and keeping up a normal social life with normal people, some of whom I still talk to. I had to sit down a mutual friend once and explain why I did not want to see my ex at all, for any reason, and the friend was in complete shock.

I guess, in my over share, what I mean to say is: Monsters aren’t always so obvious to see from the outside looking in.

Well, we may call it “testosterone poisoning” as a joke (I’m male btw), but I think history (and science) shows we are the more easily agitated, more violent, more sexually aggressive gender — as a whole of course, there’s always exceptions.

And even though I have lead a decent ‘normal’ life, haven’t hurt anybody (other than the occasional adolescent fist fight), and would be considered ‘safe’ by most definitions, I still get your point. Being a parent to a beautiful young girl now, I am afraid for the future she faces. Why? Because I remember what it was like being 15 with raging hormones, and want to f*ck anything that moved for reasons I didn’t even understand, because I have felt really hostile/aggressive feelings, that had I had a little less impulse control, could have turned ugly. And without getting into the whole 2nd amendment thing, we in the US live in a country of 300+ million guns, with many people willing to use them too quickly and for the wrong reasons.

We are animals. I mean it literally, as I always find it interesting when people talk about humanity as if we are apart from the animal kingdom Yes, we are capable of great things, but we are still so very primitive, superstitious, violent and selfish more than we’d like to admit, and I think men have demonstrated much more than their share of those tendencies.

I should add that part of my nihilistic loathing today, comes from only learning a few hours ago that one of the two people killed in the office shooting in Arizona last week was a college classmate of mine, Mark Hummels. Murdered by some pissed off 70 year old white guy over a legal dispute and a few grande. Though I wasn’t in touch with him after college, by all accounts Mark was a decent, honest, good guy, and insanely bright (he finished near top of the class undergrad at CC, summa cum laude at Berkeley, and got the highest score of the bar exam in AZ the year he took it) . And now his 7 and 9 year old children don’t have their father… because some pissed off prick gave in to all those hostile, angry impulses and used a gun instead of his brain. My view on our species had already been in toilet for some time, then there was Sandy Hook, and now yet another workplace murder, and they’re so f*cking common they hardly make news anymore.

While I’m ranting to the anonymous folks of Boing Boing. You know what else enrages me. Internet trolls making sick dead lawyer jokes about Mark’s death. The guy did pro bono legal work for people who couldn’t afford it, and helped overturn a conviction of a guy unjustly imprisoned for 10 yrs. And the bile these people post just made me feel disgust for our species even more.

It’s pretty obvious to me what the problem is. There are simply way too many people on this planet, when we live in such close proximity to many millions of other people, will can’t help but wonder what our purpose is. Some people deal with this by believing in a god, and elevating their own importance as all these gods tell them they are special. Some people worship celebrity culture, and believe that they too can be famous, and that they too are unique and special and have so much talent that needs discovering. Some people invent a war in their head, and see themselves as leaders in this great war against the evil and hidden oppressors, and only they with their enlightenment know the truth, and are fighting this war on behalf of all the ignorant sheep out there. A small number of people are actually useful and really do benefit society.

The point is, in the past when numbers were small, most people had a purpose and were necessary to the survival of everyone. Quite simply, most people aren’t necessary, or important, and the realisation of those who find they are just deluding themselves can drive them insane. I don’t know why you think this is a gender issue, because it has nothing to do with gender. Women are just as capable of committing horrific acts against their own family, and there are just as many examples.

The disease is trying to cope with mortality and insignificance by lying to yourself. The cure is accepting that you are not important to the world, but that you are important to the small group of people who’s lives you affect around you, and doing you best to make their lives better.

This guy is a perfect example of getting it the wrong way round, trying to be important to the world to satisfy his own false sense of self-worth, and ignoring the importance of his own family until his delusions finally caught up with him.

I see this disease every day, mostly in the form of this puerile celebrity culture. As wonderful as the internet is, it has also greatly perpetuate this idea that everyone can be famous. Just look at the narcissistic nature of Facebook, where so many people use it just to show how important and interesting they think they are. How can you not know what this disease is? It’s everywhere you frigging look!

With these things, I wonder if they aren’t acting like David Koresh or other cults, where they have been predicting the end of the world (e.g., “If Obama wins…”), and when the world doesn’t end, they decide they need to end the world themselves (at least for them, and those they kill along the way).

I agree that this is, by definition, mentally ill. But it’s also a clear, conscious, and “reasoned” choice.

I had obsessions with conspiracies and the supernatural for years before something began to vex me about them. It’s marvelously ego-inflating, isn’t it, to always be the one who has their eyes open and their consciousness expanded? Makes someone feel superior to the “sheeple” that just aren’t informed or are benefitting from the “big lie.”

A tragedy without any doubt.
Nevertheless, is this article implying all conspiracy nuts are suicidal and potential murderers ? Thats how i read it at least.
I do not know this persons life and i strongly condemn what happened there , if you think you are at the end of the rope and want to commit suicide , so be it but leave other people out of it.
But i strongly doubt that these sort of acts are systematically perpetrated by conspiracy theorists.(or vice versa)

The thing is, 9/11 truthers and birthers, for example, have seeped into our mainstream culture. We have Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh screaming at the top of their lungs about this stuff, and they are considered part of mainstream media, no matter how fucking nuts that seems. This sort of craziness, often tinged with a lot of fear and violence, is not all that extreme. It gets way too much air time to be extreme. We have way too many politicians who are birthers or truthers.

I know people who aren’t even particularly crazy or angry that believe some of this crap! It’s frightening. Just turn on Fox News — the fear mongering is real.

So, no, I don’t think this article is trying to imply that all conspiracy nuts are suicidal and potential murderers, but rather that this outcome isn’t particularly surprising. Or at least, it isn’t to me.